Tally Richards: “Eleven years ago, Fritz was 32” (1980)

Tally Richards, photo by Slim Arons,
United Artists Pictures

In Taos, 1970, Phillip Harrington Photo

The most surprising quality about Tally Richards, of Tally Richards Gallery of Contemporary Art, Taos, is her candor.  “I have no secrets,” she says, and, aside from her age, she means it.  Her past is checkered with events that would be scandalous for someone else, but her matter-of-factness about them reduces their gossip value.  Which is not to say that Tally isn’t careful:  she assented to this interview with Artlines ‘associate editor Lois Gilbert on the condition that her replies be made in writing.  Gilbert’s list of questions was compiled after talking with the subject’s friends, associates and enemies, and after hours of untaped conversation with Tally herself.

There have been many rumors about the Tally Richards who changed her name, drank heavily, and worked as a model and chorus girl in New York.  Can you set the record straight about your wild youth?

As a first question for an ARTlines interview this comes as a surprise and somewhat of a shock.  When I said I have no secrets, it was said in an atmosphere of friendly exchange.  I did not have the National Enquirer in mind, not even a local one, though I often deal with the baffling experiences of my life in story form or poetry; and I’m always willing to probe beneath the surface of experience in a serious way with anyone interested in doing so.  Someone said, “Indifference to public opinion is an essentially aristocratic virtue.”  I hope this is true, because I am indifferent to public opinion, though very sensitive to the opinions of close associates whom I respect.  I would not want my reputation to reflect on them in any adverse way.  This, to me, is a grave responsibility, and I’ll consider this interview an opportunity to clarify some of the misconceptions about me and my interests, both public and private.

The phrase wild youth makes me feel ancient, and simultaneously, like a child—my mother would use words such as scandal, rumors, and gossip.  And I do realize that such words as New York Model /Chorus Girl produce certain assumptions.  There’s a sense of shame thrown out with them for anyone who wants to catch it, as though one who would do such things is sensational, or dumb, or to use my mother’s word, common, or at the very least frivolous.   In actuality, my dancing, modeling, and singing were not so different from what you did so well with the Magic Mirror Players – what Jacki McCarty, who has a flawless reputation as wife and mother, does in Taos and Santa Fe restaurants, and what young girls in Taos do in Sam’s Shop fashion shows – sing, dance, and show beautiful clothes.  It’s simply a means of transporting oneself, as well as the audience, out of a mundane existence by giving visual and audible pleasure. 

Change of names is another thing loaded with assumption in most people’s minds.  Again, the message is that it has to do with shame, that maybe people think I’m hiding a prison record or something – God only knows what people think.  The facts are that I was born Barbara Anne Stackhouse, which my modeling agent did not like, and which I did not like because people were always making jokes about my last name.  The agent suggested the name Tally Richards, which he liked, and I did not like.  But it was a time when women usually believed men – any man – knew more than any woman could ever know, I used the name for modeling assignments that my male agent had suggested.  That led to a name change on my Social Security records, as well as other records, such as my Bloomie’s charge account.  Finally it was easier to legalize the name I was using than to go back to my original name. 

Wild youth?  Tormented youth would be a better description.  Even in my most intoxicated moments, people said I was a lady!  I would give anything to be wicked and shameless and unrestrained.  I went to a psychiatrist to see what he could do to help, but he said I would never be an extrovert.  He said I might become a warm and charming introvert.  It seems as though my twenties were spent lugging around a heavy photo book – uptown, downtown, across town – and it would always be winter, and cold, and windy.  And I would always hope I wouldn’t get a job because I hate floodlights and spotlights.  I felt all I could do was look pretty while waiting for Mr. Wonderful, who my mother kept assuring me was in the offing.  It never even occurred to me to do anything but mark time until Mr. Wonderful came and gave me lots of children.

What I really loved to do then was to sing, and I studied with Luther Henderson, who taught Eartha Kitt and Tony Bennett and the girl who sang for Rita Hayworth in “Gilda.”  Luther didn’t want me as a student because I was so inhibited, but his partner, Richard, said I had a beautiful voice and insisted I study with them.  So for Richard’s sake I got a job singing in an East Side supper club.  And Luther couldn’t believe that I could get a job singing when the girl who sung for Rita Hayworth couldn’t.  So he came to hear me and brought a fat lady who was Bloody Mary in South Pacific.  And then he couldn’t believe how great I was singing in this supper club.  He didn’t know I had drunk two martinis.  I had discovered that two martinis or Scotch, wine, and brandy at dinner made me feel part Latin.  And I kept drinking and singing because of Richard.  He believed in me.  But I soon realized that martinis and Scotch were getting to be a problem, and I went to an AA meeting intending to just cut down a bit, but to my surprise and everybody else’s, I’ve never had a drink since then and only sing now in the shower.

After the AA meeting I felt part Japanese – as though I were padding about in slippers, arms folded, or, perhaps, like the Chinese, pleasant and quiet but inscrutable.  It was about then that I started asking a wise friend of mine named Joseph, “What will I do when I’m old?”  And each time he would say, “What everybody else does.”  Not wanting to get married, I took a secretarial course.  And now here I am in Taos.  And no matter what I do in the future, I suppose people will be far more interested in my short stint as a Copa Girl or when I drank Scotch, wine, and brandy with dinner.

Describe the early years in Taos and the sequence of events that led you to the artists currently exhibiting in your gallery.

I came out in 1969 and was unable to find a job here.  Several artists I met urged me to open a gallery for contemporary art.  There was none here because there was no market for contemporary art in Taos.  Having once won $102 on a $2 place parlay and with little to lose – I think I had about $500 when I arrived, of which $200 was spent on stationery, painting the walls white, and a few art books to sell – I opened the gallery, leasing the patio for what I believe was Taos’s first outdoor restaurant.  Every month for nine years I was sure I would go out of business.  I was never even one month ahead on expenses.  Quite often the financial pressure made me wish I would go out of business, but at the last desperate moment a sale would come through, or I would be able to borrow more money.

To make matters worse, I opened a second gallery at One Ledoux and, with the first gallery at Two Ledoux, and 23 artists, it was very confusing and financially the worst year I ever had.  I feel much happier now giving more space and attention to six artists, rather than feeling crowded for space and pulled apart.  I was able to survive because I did everything myself – most things very badly, such as ad layouts and painting gallery walls and sculpture stands.  I knew so little about what I was doing that a lot of people in those days would ask me if they could see the owner.  Edmond Gaultney’s advice was to “dress better and get a beautiful tea set.”  John Manchester, contradicting this, said the owner could wear anything but that what I needed was a stunning piece of jewelry to wear with jeans. 

Aside from the financial pressures, it was a happy and stimulating time.  Struggle usually is.  It was like being very young again but with less vulnerability.  The artists I’m showing now came in various ways – each an interesting story which I’m saving for a book.

Your gallery is viewed by some people as a shrine to snobbery in art.  They declare that you never really take a chance on an unknown artist, or innovative art.  Other people maintain that the gallery is an indispensable arbiter of quality.  How do you feel about the gallery?

What arouses rage in me – besides prejudice, assumptions, and parrots – is when someone tells me that I never show young, unknown artists.  As to innovation, I don’t think you’ll find a more innovative artist anywhere than Larry Bell.  I have never looked at an artist’s credentials before deciding to show his work.  I have looked at the work and have been sensitive to or aware of my feeling response to it.  I have also never “cased” other galleries or gone after the painters who are selling well, as many gallery owners in New Mexico do.  None of the gallery artists I am now showing had gallery representation in the Southwest until they showed with me.  All of the artists I show now have several galleries in the Southwest. 

Eleven years ago, when I started showing Fritz Scholder’s work, it had been seen in museums in the Southwest, but it had not been seen in New Mexico galleries – primarily because his paintings of Indians were too controversial.  As soon as his paintings began to sell, however, every gallery in New Mexico was willing to show them.  Eleven years ago Fritz was 32.

Five years ago, when Larry Bell and Ken Price began showing here, very few people in New Mexico knew their names or had seen their work, despite their international reputation with museums and serious art collectors.  It was two years before I sold any of Larry’s work.

Earl Linderman, a man in his 40s, head of the Art Department at Arizona State, didn’t have a gallery because none of them thought they could sell his work.  I gave him a show three summers ago, and he now has three other galleries.  His shows sell out and people come to them dressed as Dr. Thrill and the Snake Lady, the fantasy characters he paints.

Brian Quinn is a young sculptor I’ve shown for several years without making a sale for him, although one of his sculptures was stolen.  If in the next year or so his work begins to sell, everyone will forget the time when he was unknown and I was showing his sculptures.

I also showed Melissa Zink’s paintings before she began working with clay.  She did not have a gallery at that time.  I was the first to show in New Mexico the work of Lincoln Fox, when he was working with plexiglass, which was so long ago I can’t remember his original name.  I’ve also shown work by Judy Rhymes, Gina Bilwin, Marcia Oliver, John Wenger, Julian Harr, and dear Tommy Hicks, who was totally unknown in New Mexico 11 years ago.  Some of these people are still young, still unknown, and some have become very well-known and older.  Which is not to imply that I had anything to do with the present-day situation or age of any of them

It is they who have thrown a spotlight on me.  I simply provided a little space and made a few introductions for the personal satisfaction of introducing exciting new work to this area and the privilege of living with it for a short time in exchange for my time and interest.  And though I agree with Will Strunk, who scorned the vague and the colorless, who said, “If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!”  I still prefer quietness, or back rows and dark corners.  And I occasionally mourn the loss of privacy and long for the anonymity of Taos before moving from California.

I believe I speak for the artists I now represent, as well as for myself, in saying the financial rewards were not the prime motivation for the work that they do – in the beginning or now – any more than it is for several dedicated actresses and actors in Taos theater companies.  For some, a total involvement takes place without any conscious decision being made and one is swept along in its wake.  One thinks of money as a means of continuing one’s work, and if more than necessary comes along it’s an unexpected bonus and delight.

I’m in awe of the artists I represent for the risks they’ve taken, the obstacles they’ve overcome, the responsibility they’ve assumed, the criticism and misconceptions about their work that they’ve endured, the integrity they maintain, and the balance and the dignity and style with which they’ve handled success.  Because of this, as I said at the start of this interview, I consider these associations a grave responsibility and quite often I feel unworthy, ill-equipped, and speechless – and here I’ve said all this.  Quite often, too, I think of my gallery as some sort of miracle.  I think it’s unique.  Not everyone agrees – I can tell by the way the lights dim when they walk in.

Why did you choose Taos?  Why have you never left?

I chose Taos because it’s different from any place I’ve ever been, yet similar to places I’ve cared for.  I like variety, and it’s similar to New York in having a variety of cultures.  The movement of the air at night is very similar to the air near the sea.  I’ve often thought about why Taos seems to satisfy so many people who’ve lived so many other places and why those who were born here seldom leave.  For me it’s somewhat like the last stop before infinity – the beautiful infinity one sees driving north from Santa Fe, at the top of the last hill before the straight-away into Taos – and sometimes it seems like heaven and earth in the very beginning.  I feel at last I’m in the right place at the right time, and that I’m using all my experience and training in an integrated way.  I feel the muddy season is over and spring is here with a couple of jonquils and a tulip or two.  I haven’t left because I’m not quite ready for infinite beauty.

Melissa Zink said that your self-image is your main strength and main weakness.  You have a conviction about your ability to do what you do and an equal conviction that you are a melancholy, shy person.  How do you perceive yourself?  How do you think you are perceived by the people in Taos?

I believe everyone’s main strength is also their main weakness.  My main strength and weakness is my compulsive, obsessive nature.  About things I like.  This works well for me as an art dealer.  It does not serve me well, however, with chocolates, ice cream, smoking, alcohol, or in intimate relationships.

Melissa is partly right about my convictions.  I have strong convictions about the work I show, although I’ve never had strong convictions about my ability to sell the work I show, primarily because it is different, and most people are afraid or uncomfortable with anything different.  And yes, I am melancholy and shy or socially awkward.  Although I once thought an easy charm was what one should aspire to, I now find it hollow.  Polite, unfelt phrases echo.  They’re trite coverlets.  I shy away from social situations where these are necessary. 

I see myself as a very private-public person, a neurotic, paradoxical character who likes extremes such as New York or Taos; Larry Bell’s work, which is cool and meditative, or the work of Fritz Scholder and Earl Linderman, which is bold and colorful.  Anything in between is in between.

Recently you published a book of short stories, TALLY 13.  Tell me about the book and the effect your audience has had on you.

The book is a collection of perhaps the shortest short stories that have ever been written, except for John O’Hara’s.  There are 13 stories on 42 pages.  It took 14 years to write them.  The stories can be read at fast-food counters, between futuristic transit stops, and during television commercials.  Still, several friends have not had time to read them.  The theme of the book is the sadness of lost intimacies in an era of great mobility, disposable products, and instant foods and gratification.  Several of my friends made no comment at all, and one simply said that I failed to assert my copyrights. The most touching responses to the book were from distant, less intimate friends. One called from North Carolina, said he had just read my book and felt very close to me. And another said thank you on a picture card of Edward Hopper’s “Evening Wind,” which said better than words that I had communicated the feeling that I sometimes have. But the stories also have humor, and one friend called to let me hear her daughter’s laughter as she read one of the stories that I, too, have often laughed about. So I felt the response or lack of response revealed more about the emotional validity of my relationships than about my writing. In other words, I believe that many friendships are based on a false premise and maintained by hiding more of one’s true opinions and feelings than one reveals. And, too, writing that probes emotions deeply and honestly uncovers the unseen, unexpressed nature of the writer. And this can be a shock, a surprise, or experienced as a betrayal by someone who felt close to the writer and learns how little he knew, how distant they were.

-- Lois Gilbert, December, 1980

Bernard Plossu: I Photograph the Weather (1981)

Bernard Plossu seldom seems to rest.  He is an achiever.   There are in print four books of his work—Surbanalism (Surrealism of the Banal), Go West, Le Voyage Mexicain (1965-66), and Egypt.  He is now actively working on books of his African desert and New Mexico photographs.

When he is not creating or promoting his own work, he is promoting another photographer’s work.  A show of photographs by four French women photographers, curated by Plossu, hangs this month at the Santa Fe Gallery of Photography.  He, in concert with Beaumont Newhall and Gilles Mora, is organizing a large exhibition of work by Santa Fe photographers which is scheduled to travel in June to the Arles Photo Festival, and later in the summer to the American Center in Paris. 

A show of his work entitled Selected Works (Mexico to New Mexico, via Africa and Rome), opens April 26 at the Eaton-Shoen Gallery in San Francisco. 

Let’s begin with the usual background stuff.  Where did you study photography?

Rather than speak of studies, I think what is interesting is . . . let me put it this way:  I was born in Vietnam, of French colonial parents, and they still are my best friends.  That’s more important to me than where I studied, because it means I had a very good youth and that kind of education to me is the first key to being a happy person and doing interesting things, more so than any degree.  My father is a mountaineer and my mother is of Italian origin and a poet.  My first picture-taking was in the Sahara at 13 years old, with a Brownie box camera.

I was raised in Paris and I studied philosophy, but I didn’t like it.  When I was 19, I was sent to Mexico, to the other side of my family and that’s where I started really taking a lot of photographs.  What happened was there was an English expedition that was going to go for a three-month trip along these rivers that had never been explored.  The expedition had taken two years to organize, but at the last minute the photographer couldn’t go and they needed anybody.  I just rang the door and said I have a camera, and they said you’re hired, and two days after that we took off in the jungles.  It was my first job in photography.  It was very difficult, a lot of rain and rapids and animals, terrible.  It actually came out in French magazines entitled Green Hell.  From that story, a lot of French magazines gave me stories to do.  Thirteen years later I made a book of the Mexican trip, but I had no idea when I was doing all those pictures at 20 years old that I would become a professional editorial photographer, doing stories, book covers, illustrations, very little advertising, no fashion.

So you really had no formal training?

You have to keep in mind that 15 years ago there was no such thing as photography accepted as art.  Universities in Europe weren’t teaching that way.  The only way a photographer like me, in France, could make a living was to do it, to take pictures and then to sell them.  My background in photography is work, and I’m tempted to say I’m proud of it.  I think the gap between creative photography and commercial photography now is much too big.  One has to remember that some of the best photographers in the world have done their best work on assignment.  It is not a shame to take pictures for money.

You’ve got quite the reputation for your African photographs.  How did you first get to Africa?  Was that an assignment?

One of my clients was an airline, and they paid me in airline tickets and a week later I was in Africa, where I got this feeling that I had to go back to my own photography.  The first country I went to was Niger.  By the people who love Africa, Niger is known as Africa in Africa.  It’s still primitive and ethnic:  the tribes, the music, the customs—everything is still very much like it was.  I just went crazy.  It was so strong, meeting nomads and living with them.  My wife Kathy and I met Fulani nomads, the Touareg people . . . we’ve been back to Africa many times.  But after that first trip, I just couldn’t think in terms of commercial work anymore. 

How did you end up in New Mexico?

Some friends from Mexico lived here and we visited them.  First I spent two years photographing in Taos, and then we moved to Santa Fe.  I’ve always liked the desert.  It’s something where time stops, and in some way it reminds me of East Indian music.  The shenai, for example, is a wind instrument that makes the same sound as the wind over the desert.  Bothe sounds have the feeling of timelessness and peacefulness.  And it’s odd because  the musicians themselves don’t think of time like we do.  Their music isn’t structured in beats like ours.  And there’s nothing better than to be on top of a hill in the desert and look around you and it’s just space, no noise, no time.  You have to be at peace with yourself.  That emptiness is very good for the soul.  We just wanted to keep that brown lands feeling, to be in the desert, and the American desert is one of the most beautiful deserts in the world.  I still feel the attraction of my Italian roots, though, so every year I go back to Rome. 

Artists like to talk about the special quality of the light in New Mexico.  Do you find it any different here than, say, in the African deserts?

No, it’s the same light.  You know the way some photographers like to take pictures only at dawn or sunset, I love to take pictures at noon when things are ugly, because it’s the reality of the desert.  The desert is harsh, it’s not romantic.  At noon the light is tough.  It’s blinding, but it’s a great moment to photograph. 

Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?

I can’t say.  One critic of the Mexican book said the work was spiritual and sensual.  There are people who make a job of being spiritual or a job of being an artist.  How can you make a job with a state of mind, with a piece of your soul?  Many times I meet people, I ask what you do and they answer me, I’m an artist.  I find that embarrassing!  You cannot say about yourself you are an artist or a spiritual person, maybe others can feel it in you, but don’t try to self-define yourself as such.  It’s like saying artists are members of some special social class.  What artists from all times always have been looking for is independence, so why suddenly want to belong to the artist community?  I think creation is a guide to freedom.  I would certainly never dare say of myself I’m this or that specifically.  The only think I can say is that I’m trying to understand the world through photography.  I’m just one more photographer doing a testimony of my times.   

But the work of an artist . . .  a photographer . . . is different from that of a factory worker.  Don’t you think you have a talent?

I don’t think you can control the things you do well.  We have to be careful with these terms, because the most dangerous idea is that you are born with a gift.  Talent is something to be aware of, but to be careful with these words, huh?  There are people who suddenly feel spiritual, so they think they have to look spiritual.  You see them walking around.  I could never dress like that.  Why do you have to look like a spiritual person?  Talent is the same sort of thing.  I think all these things are very secretive.  If they come out in one’s work, great.

How would you describe your own work?  Would you say your intention is to capture reality, rather than to create something new?

There’s no doubt that what I’m concerned with in my photography is reality, and perhaps that’s a very European trend in photography.  Someone once wrote about me that what I do and the way I live are uncontrived.  It was Allen Porter, editor of Camera, which was the first magazine to publish me.  For many years I had to photograph things looking nice for magazines, but I quit doing that and now I use only one lens.  I just use the normal lens, 50mm.  It has no gimmicks, no wide angle; it doesn’t change anything.  It’s the most difficult lens in that respect. Since I can’t do any stylish exercises with it, I can let the subject of the photograph talk even stronger, by itself, for itself, without imposing vision or interpretation of my own.  My ego fades into the background, and so the concern is the reproduction of reality.  The concern is to transmit mood and circumstance.  Of course, it’s only a piece of reality, a fragment, but the good photograph suggests all the rest.

You reproduce reality, but isn’t the emphasis on mood?

I am a moody person . . . I’m Italian by my mother.  I told you that.  So there is a mood in the images, but that I can’t explain.  It’s in my blood.  There’s no explanation for your blood.

For someone who seems to love life as much as you do, your photographs often are surprisingly lonely and melancholy.  Is that a side of you that’s revealed through your pictures?

Someone once told me they thought I looked sad.  I don’t think so, and to explain how I thought I was I played some Arabic music for him.  Music like that might sound sad to an uninitiated person, but it’s not sad.  It’s very dramatic and intense, and I guess that’s what I’m talking about in the photographs.  They’re not sad . . . moody or intense is closer.  I like to photograph rain, I like to photograph heat.  As a matter of fact, when I photograph a landscape, I don’t think I photograph the landscape as much as I photograph the weather around the landscape.  That’s what makes the mood.  Krishnamurti summed it up when he said, “Perception, action, and expression are all but one.”

Could you give me a specific example of that?

Well, for instance, I took a lot of portraits in Africa.  Some of the people didn’t want their pictures to be taken, but most of them did.  I’m usually well accepted because I’m a drummer.  I play wherever I go, with anybody—tribes, people dancing, whatever.  I integrate quickly and people actually ask me to take pictures of them.  Anyway, the book I’m doing on Africa shows the parallel between the faces of Africa—the moods, the eyes, the look—and the landscapes.  Sometimes it’s amazing that a portrait of an African woman has as much to say about the African landscape as the photograph of the landscape!

Are there any particular themes that run through your work?

Yes.  I think whether it’s a portrait of a friend, or a photograph of a woman, or a child, or a landscape, or a street in Italy with shadows, the key is a rather sensual key.  By sensual I don’t mean sexual, but things that have a strong effect on any of my senses.  I photograph what my senses tell me to photograph, and so I photograph a great many things.  I love Kertesz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans because they’re photographers who have been committed to photographing everything.  I can’t stop myself and do only one thing and use it as a professional thing that I show everywhere.  I can’t because photography is a part of life for me, I breathe like I take pictures.  It’s to the point where I don’t take pictures, pictures take me.  Everything that turns me on has to be photographed.  I do what I do with a lot of pleasure.  I love taking pictures.  I always take pictures, my camera is always available, day or night.  I sleep with it, because the best picture may be when I wake up!

Now what makes the selection of a good image possible is time and a very tense sense of self-criticism.  I may need to take everything, but it doesn’t mean it’s all good.  The selection takes years, as it took me 13 years to understand the value of those Mexican photographs.  I think if I had published them right away, they would not have been that strong.

What do you think makes a good photograph?

Mystery, composition.  The prints shouldn’t be played with too much; they have to be just like the reality.  If the sky is bright and ugly, I leave it bright and ugly.  I’m not going to darken it and make a nice “aesthetic” photograph.  No way.  That’s imitating painting.  That’s a big mistake.  There’s an interesting point here:  it takes two things to make a good photograph, to see.  It takes instinct and discipline, and that’s a wonderful paradox.  You have to be disciplined, know all the technical stuff, impose rules on yourself as I have with the 50mm lens, but to take a good picture you must make it alive, transcend the discipline, and that’s the instinct, the mad, magic moment that causes you to click your camera.  Photography is an instinct; a picture is the record or the evidence of a thousandth of a second of delirium.  You have to have a little madness for that magic moment that really is the subject of a strong photograph.  But there must be discipline and delirium, and in that way, at least with 35mm photography, it’s very much like the Zen archer.  My camera is like the arrow.  Do I reach the target, or does the target reach me, or is it all the same thing?  It’s all very emotional, and I think very different from using a big view camera and a tripod, which is much more planned and careful.

To continue the comparison, if using 35mm equipment to make a good photograph is like archery, the view camera would correspond to the Japanese Tea Ceremony.

Yes, I think so.  There are exceptions, of course.  I think one of the most famous pictures ever taken, Ansel Adams’s Moonrise Over Hernandez, was one of those mad moments, something he saw in a flash and shot very quickly.

I’ve read that you said a photographer needs to learn to be a child again and go for the gut reaction and spontaneity.

The gut reaction is what I call delirium, and spontaneity is what I call being completely aware, always ready for something to happen to you.  The accident is needed in photography.  It does not matter whether a picture is in focus or a blur.  It is its soul that matters, not its sharpness.

I think children are fresh and the only way to become mature is to become a fresh child again.  I keep hearing this word all over, serious—serious photographer, serious writer.  We are children!  The last thing I want to hear about me is that I’m serious.  I want to die with my tomb reading, “He had a good time.”

You’ve had a considerable amount of success for someone your age.  Has it affected you adversely?

When you’re young, it’s easy to make the worst mistake, which is imitating yourself.  That’s worse than emulating other photographers.  I’ve seen very good young photographers become a parody of themselves, doing the same thing over and over because they know it works.  Photography should be about always shaking yourself up.  Who am I?  Do I grow up or not?

Is that one of the reasons you travel?  To shake yourself up periodically?

BP:  Yes, though I’m not such a nomad anymore because I’m a happy father.  There are a lot of rough places where I used to go where I can’t go with a little boy.  Maybe when he’s older.  But I do have to go out on a trip every once in a while.  I’m very happy with that mixture of the New Mexican desert landscapes and a few weeks of complete madness in the streets of Rome.

You’ve been compared to Cartier-Bresson.  Do you think that’s accurate?

It’s the same tradition, the French photographer with the 50mm lens.  I think the technique is the same, the reserved approach, no cropping, the image for what it is.  But while it’s the same philosophy, they’re very different images.  Just look at the contacts of my work—there are pictures of my wife, my friends, my son.  You can really see that it’s my life, more than my work, or it’s the same thing, my life and my work.  So, in that way, I think I have absolutely nothing in common with Cartier.  It’s interesting, though, that the painters he photographed like Bonnard, Matisse, Giacometti, are among the people I also prefer.  I guess it’s because their graphic sense is close to photography.  But I’m from a completely different generation from Cartier.  What your generation feeds you makes you different from the people before.  I don’t feel like being Carier’s heir at all.  I think his heir is Joseph Koudelka, not me.  My influences are closer to Kertesz or Bravo.  And the photographer I feel closest to in my own generation is Max Pam, who lives in Asia.

Photography is just now reaching a stage where there can be heirs to certain masters and traditions.  Is that, do you suppose, another indication that photography is being regarded as a fine art?

I just don’t want photography to be decoration.  The worst thing to do with photography is to say it looks like a painting.  Photography is close to drawing, sketching, and it’s very close to writing.  It’s a way of taking notes.  A writer is closer to a photographer than a painter.  I’m convinced just by the way I write notes that it’s a similar discipline.  When you write, the time it takes for the idea to come to the pen and paper is very similar to the time it takes to put the image in the camera with your eye.

Have you ever published your writing?

No.  It’s my private garden.  It’s much more angry than what I photograph.

But I’m still thinking about what we were talking about before, about the connection between the work and the times.  You know how I love quotes, and one of my favorites is from Edward Hall, a great man who lives in Santa Fe.  He said, “Man learns in seeing, and what he learns echoes on what he sees.”  The pictures I take are an accumulation of all the experiences I’ve had, everything I’ve learned, digested, see.  The pictures that I took in Rome in 1980 were certainly different from the pictures I took in Rome 10 years ago.  How can a person not change when you hear that so many people are killed in Afghanistan, when you’re confronted by more and more pain, but also fun, joy?  How can all this not influence your own life and the way you see?  To be less dramatic, how can a person who goes twice to the Villa Giulia (a museum in Rome) ever be the same again?  There’s no way.  You are influenced by Etruscan art when you go to that museum.  And what you photograph, or paint, or write, compose, is your soul plus all the outside influences that feed you. 

What’s it like living in New Mexico with so many other artists?  Do you consciously have to resist not being influenced by them?

No, I really feel I’m doing a different thing than most of them.  I’m most concerned with photographing movement, while most of the photographers in the area do landscape or static images.  If I were doing landscapes, I think they would be very different.  There would be beer cans in them.  This is a tough land, I’m nervous here.  I love it but it makes me nervous.  I think that is good.  But there’s one other thing about New Mexico that bothers me, a thing we have to be very careful about.  Remember how Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Matisse, they all lived in the south of France?  Everybody was there, and later St. Paul de Vence became a parody of art, a joke, a cliché.  Please, please let us not turn New Mexico into that kind of artsy-fartsy place.  This place is a spiritual, powerful place.  Let’s keep it that way.

Everyone seems to come here for some special reason.  Do you know why it is that the area is special to you?

One time in Taos someone said to me very seriously, “Look at the mountain.  It’s magic!”  I laughed.  O.K., it’s a nice, groovy, hippie statement, but there’s more to New Mexico than a magic hippie mountain.  It’s not what it’s about at all!  It’s now just groovy, and who wants to be groovy anyway?  Pain is such a big teacher in life, how can you avoid it?  Why does everything have to be only super-happiness?  What makes New Mexico magic is that it’s a land that’s had a fantastic mixture of cultures and civilizations, and a lot of good times and a lot of rough times.  It’s a real place and to just call it magic is limiting it tremendously.  Let’s just try to be who we are and struggle here like anywhere else.

Stephen Parks, April, 1981

John Nichols: Myths, Movies, and Mediocrity (1982)

Novelist John Nichols, along with the venerable Frank Waters, is the closest thing Taos has to a dean of letters.  His New Mexico Trilogy, The Milagro Beanfield War (1974), The Magic Journey (1978), and The Nirvana Blues (1981), traces the fictional history and the modern traumas of Chamisaville, a small town, not unlike Taos, in northern New Mexico.  In the trilogy, and in his non-fiction If Mountains Die (published by Knopf, all other works having been published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston), a lyric evocation of the Taos area with color photographs by William Davis, Nichols gives a fuller expression of his deep political concern than in his previous books, The Sterile Cuckoo (1965, the mopvie of which starred Liza Minelli), The Wizard of Loneliness (1966), and A Ghost in the Music (1979).  His newest book, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, is expected to be in bookstores June 18.  Recently, John has become involved in writing for films, working on screenplays not only for his own Milagro, with Robert Redford, and Magic Journey, with Louis Malle, but Missing, directed by Constantin Costa-Gravras, and another film in the works by Costa-Gravras.

Nichols has lived in Taos since the late ‘60s, and though I have often seen him at the Post Office and breakfasting at Dori’s Bakery next door, I never spoke with him until Stephen Parks set up our interview.  John lives in an old adobe house just outside of town, and we pulled up to it on a blustery early spring day in late March.  Nichols was on the phone when we arrived and he waved us into the kitchen, continued with the phone conversation, running his hand through his hair, looking harried and boyish – almost like a grown-up Dennis the Menace.  Nichols hangs up the phone emphatically, and breezily welcomes us “Siddown, siddown.”  We sit at the kitchen table, Nichols, Parks, and I, which is piled high with newspapers, reference books, manuscripts, works in progress, his typewriter precariously perched on a thick book so he can sit comfortably at it.  “Just shove all that stuff outta the way,” he directs as we sit down.  I push over a section of the heap, making room for my tape recorder and notebook.  A large file cabinet stands next to the refrigerator, news clippings and cartoons are scotch-taped to cabinets and areas of the wall around the sink. A combination wood and gas cook stove, into which he periodically tosses a small log during the interview, sits against the opposite wall.  Nichols is the height of informality as he offers us instant coffee or, if we prefer, something stronger.

I’ll have a beer.  Thanks John.

Let me get you a glass.

What about that movie you saw last night, Reds?  I saw you sitting at the end of the row.  What did you think?

I thought . . . Well, first I get so enraged by the fact that the guy can’t get a bulb into his goddamned projector, so that every time he switches projectors you get a wiped out, vapid, drab shining on the screen.  One of the things that makes me so mad is that nobody in the audience complains or gets upset.  (Shouting)  I mean, people just accept this mediocrity!  They don’t even notice it.  I’ve walked out of films two or three times screaming, “Would you please frame it?”

You go to movies a lot?

I go to them less than I used to.  I love movies, but it’s like I’m just infuriated.  It seems like I’m struggling in everything I do to try and avoid mediocrity or compromise.  Gosh, I’ve been working on a non-fiction book with my own photographs and it just breaks my heart . . .

What is that?

It’s called The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn – a little bit like If Mountains Die, but in a different vein, with sixty-five of my own photographs.  And just the process with the color separations, and trying to get them right or be willing to put the money into getting the color right, it’s totally frustrating.  The press prints come back, and they’re bland and drab, out of register, and they look like the Sunday comics.

I was just talking to somebody about that and the book, Two Cheers for Democracy, by E.M. Forster.  He reserved his third cheer because essentially democracy, despite freedom or because of it, means mediocrity in the end.

Really?

Yes, because democracy lowers everything to the least common denominator . . .

Well, maybe.  I don’t know.  First of all, we don’t live in a democracy.  (Pause, then laughter) It’s a capitalist society, and capitalism and democracy aren’t synonyms at all.  But anyway, what do you want to know?  (Laughter)

That’s enough.  (Laughter)  “We do not live in a democracy.”

Uh uhn.  (Pause)  One of the greatest successes of our country is the ability of the myth-making propaganda and educational system to equate democracy and capitalism.  To actually sit there with the Declaration of Independence that says all men are created equal – except blacks of course, and women, who have no rights at all . . .

Non-property holders, in fact.

Yes, but to equate that statement with capitalism which is a class society, which is just the opposite...  Adam Smith says that for every rich person you have to have 500 poor people.  That’s the way a capitalist society works.

Did you see that Academy Awards last night when Beatty accepted the director award?  His speech got political all of a sudden, talking about what a great country we live in because he was allowed to make the movie with money from Gulf and Western, a “serious film,” he said, about the left, and about the Communist party, and the Socialist party in America, which I thought . . . It wasn’t a serious film about the Communist party in America, it was a little romance, confection . . .

And another reason it was so successful was because it’s an anti-communist film.  Basically, everybody’s disillusioned, the revolution’s over, Emma Goldman says get the hell out.  There are some real good things in the film.  The first film I’ve seen in public in America where someone admitted that the Soviet Union, after the revolution, was invaded by twenty-two different nations – actually, the movie says sixteen.  The movie’s full of shit.  (Laughter)  it was interesting.  It’s hard in a film to get into the intricacies, but when you make a decision to end a picture like that – when he dies – instead of during his funeral and the fact that he’s the only American buried in the Kremlin Wall.  He was buried as a national hero!  His death was a huge thing of national mourning.  Millions of people came out.  I just finished a biography by a fellow named Robert Rosenstone (Romantic Revolutionary:  A Biography of John Reed . . .)

Yes, I’m looking at it right here. 

Louise Bryant arrives in Russia and they spend months running around going to cafes and drinking, having a great time.  Things were bad and things were good, but there was this incredible ferment.  Not at all cynical and miserable.  But like I say, it’s not really important to . . . verisimilitude is not very important.  I’m a firm believer that you buy a book, throw it away, and then go see the movie.  It takes a whole different kind of construction.  Ninety-nine percent of the films I’ve seen have been taken from books or real life, right?  And they’ve been awed by the writer or the stature of the event so they try to repeat it word for word and they fail miserably.  For example, The Great Gatsby . . .

I saw it in the middle of the afternoon.  I enjoyed it a lot.  (Laughter)

Just horrible. And one of the reasons it’s so bad is that were so awed by Fitzgerald that they used his lingo word for word.

What about The Sterile Cuckoo?  Doing that . . . did that change your mind?

I wrote a couple of drafts.  The concept changed radically when Liza Minnelli came into the film.  It became a star vehicle for her, which meant all the social comment from the book came out.  The book’s main comment about how social relationships in college go down during the ages of 18 to 21, that was pretty much lost.  So the whole tone of the movie was real different from the book and yet the reviews of the movie almost read word for word like the reviews of the book.  It’s interesting.  I blew it because I didn’t understand how to translate books into movies.  For example, books are exaggerated, prose is exaggerated.  You make your point with prose on a page with little black symbols and have to stimulate people’s imaginations to make things real.  You write your ass off.  Most dialogue is exaggerated or repeated to make a point.  Movies, because the impact is so huge on the screen . . . if somebody twitches their eye it becomes a character trait or an emotional cue as to what they’re thinking.  Just the clothes they have on have an enormous impact.

You just did some work with Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, etc.). 

I’m still doing it.  I rewrote one picture, Missing, which just came out.  And now I’m doing another one.

But it was for work you weren’t credited for, right?

No, I didn’t get credit.  The Writer’s Guild holds an arbitration to see who deserves credits according to their formula.  They have a formula like you have to write a third of the picture.  Which can be real bullshitty because often . . .

It could be key scenes.

Yeah.  It could be not even a lot of writing but something like editing or fine tuning in a few key scenes that divulge something.

Is that what you did, fine tune?

Well, I rewrote the whole script.  And my basic job was to give the people personalities and relationships with each other.  What they had was a kind of Kafkaesque thriller/search.

Very stiff.

Yeah.  And the relationships between the three main people weren’t worked out at all.

But it worked very well, I heard.

Yes, it worked out real well!  It breaks my heart when I see the movie because the writing that I did was so crucial to making it function.  There’s hardly a scene in the picture that doesn’t have something, a touch, language, lingo.  The film had no Americanisms.  But anyway, the politics are real heavy in the industry.  (Pause)  I know a lot more about the process now.  And if it comes up again I know much better how to fight.

That brings up the subject of unions and how their role has changed in U.S. history.

Well, unions are really important.  The Writer’s Guild is a very powerful union.  It’s essentially a closed shop.  You don’t work in the industry unless you are a member of the Guild.  That’s an important union concept.  Unions are like everything else in our country.  They’ve been corrupted by the system.  That doesn’t mean you throw them out.  (Pause) Anything anybody’s got in this country, workwise, is because of unions – from women’s suffrage to the eight hour work day, to workman’s compensation, to retirement plans.  Anything is because the unions, because no employer would voluntarily give anybody anything, as we who live in Taos know.  Try to get a job in the area and the only decent job in Taos County is at the Moly Mine as far as wages and benefits.  (Pause)  But unions have been co-opted, union leadership in particular, just like any other institution in the country.  Name an institution that hasn’t been co-opted.

Even baseball.

Baseball is interesting.  Football is interesting, because it’s one of the areas where you have a definite class struggle where workers have some power.  Of course what you have happening is the management and the unions pretty much battle each other with the same philosophy, which winds up with . . .

Let’s see who can make the most money.

Yeah.  Everybody losing.  It’s the reason why the feminist movement collapsed, or I think it collapsed.  It never got political.  It never had a historical perspective.  It never had a political perspective.  Women wanted equal pay for equal jobs, right?  Within a capitalist system.  Which simply meant that even if a woman gets equal pay for an equal job, she’s still going to have to step over thirty people, whether they’re men or women, to get up to that job.

Where do you start then?

You change the system.  You change the philosophy. 

You think that’s the first question?

Yeah, of course it’s the first question.  No woman is ever going to have equality as long as she asks for it within any capitalist system, because the system depends upon a class structure where somebody has to be exploited.  It’s like a glass of water filled to the top – you put another drop in and something has to fall out.  That’s the way the system works.  It’s like the perpetuation of the great myth.  Warren Beatty makes Reds, or Costa-Gavras makes Missing.  John Nichols is allowed to publish things like The Magic Journey in the straight press.  But the fact is that the system doesn’t change at all.  We just maintain the illusion that we don’t live in a class society.  (Pause)  I was reading an article by Henry Steele Commager in the L.A. Times, dumping all over Reagan.  And he’s not the most radical person in the world, but he said the Reagan administration is the first administration that will openly admit that we live in a class society, we have always had a working class in the country of anywhere from thirty to ninety million people.  We always have a base of poor people, we have to.  We can’t live in a society based on profits without somebody . . .

Taking the short end.

Yeah, that’s right.  But we never admit it.  There’s always the myth of democracy.  The myth that they’re all shiftless lazy welfare bums, because anyone who works hard can make it.  That’s bullshit!  There isn’t enough money, there aren’t enough jobs.  Anybody who lives in Taos County knows the tourist industry is based on having a wide base of people who are very poor who will work for very low wages in order that the hotel, motel, and gallery owners can make their profits.  They’ll never rise.  It’s impossible, there isn’t enough wealth, as long as the few people who control our economy insist on making the kinds of profits they make.

(At this point a woman enters with a phone message for John.  She leaves, John picks up the phone and dials . . . ) This is the Costa-Gavras thing.  You keep making travel arrangements and then you keep having to change them.  It’s crazy.  Airplanes . . . they use airplanes like . . .

Taxi cabs. 

 (Laughter)  Yeah, taxi cabs.  Hello . . . (phone conversation arranging travel to Paris.  Afterwards – ) I just did this book tour and I had to take about thirty-five plane flights in a three week period, plus do Hollywood stuff at the same time.

How did you keep it together?  Your health among other things?

I didn’t.  I’m not very good at any of that stuff.

What does that kind of schedule do to your writing?

It’s getting harder.  Last year I rewrote one screenplay for Costa-Gavras in January and February, I wrote a 100,000 word book March through May, I did four drafts of The Milagro Beanfield War . . . 

For a screenplay?

Yeah.  And I did a first draft of a nuclear scientist script for Costa-Gavras.

You wrote The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn from March to May?

Yes, one draft.  Corrected it and typed it out.  Usually things don’t work out that way.

That’s pretty fast.

Yeah, I wrote Milagro like that.

Came right out?

Oh, yeah.  I wrote it in about five weeks.  I sat down and I was editing a newspaper called The New Mexico Review.  It was all voluntary, and some people were going to take the editorship and they were going to kill it, and I said, no, no.  I’ll edit it, right?  And they said okay, you’re welcome to it.  I edited it for six months.

What was it?

It was a muckraking journal.  It was a good paper.  Neat paper.  Lots of good people worked on it and never got paid.

Where was it?  In Taos?

No, out of Santa Fe.  I worked on it two years.  It was originally called The New Mexico Review and Legislative Journal and then was called The New Mexico Review, and it was run by a board of editors as a collective kind of thing.  It was funny because the two guys who owned it would always get outvoted.  These two wanted the paper to be more like a Southwestern New Yorker.  They wanted pictures in it and poetry, and they kept getting outvoted by all the pinks on the board, (laughter) who said, no, there’s so much political stuff not getting covered elsewhere that we have to cover it.  It died in November, 1972.  And I sat down in November to write The Milagro Beanfield War.  Wrote a first draft in five weeks and corrected it in three weeks, typed it in three weeks, sent it to New York, and they bought it three weeks later.

Has it been so easy since?

No, that was the last easy thing.  I had about eight weeks to rewrite it after they accepted it.  The Magic Journey took about four years.  Plus I had spent about eight or nine years before that working on books that were never published, including this one novel that I rewrote for ten years and could not get it to work.  So it’s real weird how one thing will work right away and others . . .

How many years between the second novel and Milagro?

I finished writing The Wizard of Loneliness in 1964 or in 1965.  No, I finished it when I was still 24.  Published in 1966, then Milagro was published in 1974.  So that was an eight year hiatus.

Were you able to live without having to work jobs elsewhere?

Yes, but I couldn’t live off my writing now.  Most of my income comes from film options or filmwork.  About a tenth of my income comes from writing.  The best royalties I get are from If Mountains Die.  It’s funny.  That one book comes out with about $1,700 a year.  The other six books in print add up to that.  (Laughter)  So, it’s not a real fast living out of books.

Were you real young when you decided you were going to be a writer?

 (Pause) It’s very strange how you wind up doing what you do.  I decided to become a writer when I wrote The Milagro Beanfield War.  That was when I decided I was going to be a writer, and yet I’d already written ten books.  I started writing a lot when I was thirteen.  I wrote a novel a year in college.  I just did it because I loved it.  When I got out of college I had no clear understanding of where I was going to go, except after the best private education money could buy I was not going to Wall Street, or be a lawyer or insurance agent.  I was going to write novels or play guitar or be a cartoonist.  I was really into cartooning.  I tried them all after college, and just sort of hit on The Sterile Cuckoo, which was probably the sixth or seventh book which I’d ever written.  And wrote The Wizard of Loneliness and then got into being pretty political . . . into the Movement.  Which changed everything I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it.

Was there any political activity for you during those years in college?

No, there was just Fair Play in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, stuff like that.  (Pause)  One of the novels I wrote in college was about the Emmett Till infamous racial lynching.  But about 1964 I really got politicized and started questioning what I was writing about, and why I was writing about it.  The legitimacy of being an artist or a writer in the United States, because everything just gets co-opted.  That was my kind of attitude.  And for many years I had real trouble feeling that my own particular kind of art or writing was a legitimate kind of political expression.  As legitimate as being on the barricades, or organizing, or marching.  So I was always torn and I almost quit writing.

A sort of paralysis set in?

Yes.  So finally I sat down and couldn’t write any books that were publishable.  Most of them were terrible.  I was trying to learn how to write a political book which ain’t easy.  Then it was funny, about ’72 I said, “Look, maybe you’re just stuck with being a writer, whether you like it or not, and you’ve blown through a whole lot of your talent or whatever and  . . .”

What, in political novels?

Just in not really concentrating on it.

On the craft?

Yes, just concentrating on the craft.  Or just admitting that that’s what you are.  Because if you admit that you are something it entails admitting that you aren’t a lot of other things.  I’m never going to be a barrel house blues piano player if I really concentrate on writing, or I’m never going to be a revolutionary organizer.  But a lot had to do with justifying writing as a viable political act.  It should be automatic.  My God!  Most of the consciousness of the world, from the revolutionaries on, is built on the power of the pen.  I said, “Okay Nichols, you better get serious about it and dedicate your life to writing.”  And I started Milagro.  And I said, “Okay, I think I’m going to call myself a writer.”

And not feel guilty about it.

Yeah.  Try not to.  You always feel guilty.  There’s just nothing but guilt.  (Nervous laughter)  Sometimes I’m sitting here writing but sometimes I’m giving a lot of speeches or helping people organize.  And then I get torn because that screws up the writing.

Are you worried about your time?

Yeah, but at the same time a lot of the energy that goes into writing comes from having a lot of contact with the outside.  It’s that old kind of conflict.  The politics are real important to me.  When you work on a film like Missing, to me that’s a real political thing.  This film on the nuclear scientist is predicated on how you do something that will add to the amount of information that will help people imagine what a nuclear war is like before it happens so we can avoid it.  It’s real important to work on projects that are . . .

Politically valid?

Well, either politically valid or just culturally valid.  There’s so much schlock out there.

It’s not a particularly supportive milieu out there in the U.S. for a politically concerned artist.

No, but we have a long tradition of politically concerned artists.  Since the ‘50s, it’s been muffled.  Everybody got a little paranoid during the McCarthy period, and that has led to a kind of conservative outlook.

Films are very immediate in terms of getting to the people, much more so than books.

Yes, they do blast people right out of their seats.  (Laughing)  You wouldn’t believe the first day that Missing was released.  More reviews came in than I’ve garnered with all my books in my whole life.

Have you seen it?

I saw a sneak preview in Philadelphia.  It’s real hard.  I can’t read my books after they go into print because I’m really bored, and that’s exaggerated in a film.  You know what’s going to happen.  It’s hard to get involved.  It was more powerful, the sneak preview, than when I saw the final release.  The studio demanded concessions, like more music or to cut certain scenes and add other scenes that I thought were a little bit hysterical or tipped slightly the good rhythm that I thought had been gotten in the film.  Plus, it’s just freaky to look at all the things that have to happen in the film, all the compromises or cuts that have to go down just because of the time limit.  Like you can’t write a 1,000 page novel.  You always have to write a ninety page book or something.

Something like that can really hone down something, too.  Make it really tight.

Most of the arts are constricted within boundaries.  One of the nice things about novels is that you can take side trips and ramble around and come back, do it in 200 pages or 1,000 pages, or write a trilogy.  This next one is going to be long!  (Laughter)  Sell it by the pound, like a fish market.  (Laughter)  You want another beer or coffee?

Thanks John, no.

Bourbon?

Aah, nah (laughter) I mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez before.  There’s a certain density to your description, a very mythical tone that you got in the beginning of Milagro.  The believability was stretched . . .

Everybody says, “Hey, you were really influenced by Marquez.”  I finished A Hundred Years of Solitude three months after I finished Milagro.  You want to get into mythology for influences, you get into the French, Dickens, to just growing up with the Elizabethan ballads.  My God, our literature is so full of myth making.  The point is that people say Marquez and I say, “Of course, I love him.”  Sure I’m influenced by Marquez.  I’m also influenced by Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda, Diego Rivera, Jose Siqueros, Thomas Berger, Mark Twain . . . I’ve never met a book I didn’t like.  (Laughter)  Damon Runyon!  I love Damon Runyon, Isaac Bashevis, Singer, Yiddish writers, Malamud.  There full of mythical weirdos, angels, talking birds.  Asturais – he was great.  All this mythological . . . But we got all that stuff in our own literature.  Moby Dick, for Christ’s sake!  A white whale zooming around the ocean.  (Laughing)  Every sentence is a myth.  (Pause)  I think it’s because I wrote about the Latin American culture, and the only thing people here are familiar with is A Hundred Years of Solitude.

You say you have French Ancestry?

Yes, my mother was French.  She died when I was two and I was brought up in this country.

Were you born in the U.S.?

I was born in California, but I think I was conceived in France.  (Laughter)  My great-grand father was a noted writer in France, he was called the “Bard of Brittany.”  All his books were about the mythology and culture of Brittany.  Full of witches and all that.  In fact, there are enormous similarities between Brittany and northern New Mexico.

In terms of cross-over, myths, or temperament?

There are only five stories that have ever been written in the history of the world, and that goes from the Greeks to the Chinese.  We’ve got Penitentes here and they’ve got Penitentes in Nyack, N.Y., who do the Stations of the Cross in three-pieced business suits.  The ritual is world-wide.  They do it in Guatemala, in Spain, in Belgium . . .

Were you raised in a religion?

Episcopalian.  You know, Schwinn bicycles . . .

That’s religion!  (Laughter)

Vanilla milkshakes.  (Laughter) Go to church on Sunday, go to the local malt shop . . .

I just wondered if there was a latent religious streak in you that might have some influence in your life . . . There is a certain religiosity involved in politics.  There’s a line that Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill in Reds says, “I love it when American intellectuals get that glint in their eye and start talking about the Russian Revolution.  I’ve seen Irish Catholicism before.”

Basically, I suppose that ideologies and thought processes can be called religious.  The thing is, when you’re discussing all that stuff philosophically, you need to take two months to sit down and define each other’s terms.  To figure out what one really means when one says “God” or “religion.”

Or “good” or “evil.”

Yeah, and you’ll notice there’s not a lot of religion in my books.  Especially in this area.  I stay away from it because it’s such an important part of the fabric and structure of the culture.

You see it as oppressive, or do you see it as a very fertile kind of tradition?

 (Pause) Yeah, I’ve got to.  I haven’t figured out how to handle it so I don’t shoot my mouth off about it.  It may be a flaw, because we ought to handle everything – or try.

Why?

Because it’s one of the greatest myths of this country is that it’s so complex we can’t really know . . .

So we can’t handle it . . .

Therefore, we are not only almost incapable of guiding our own destiny, but certainly we are incapable of having anything to say about history.  The problem with that, of course, is that history is being guided by people who know that it’s bullshit, and who have figured out, one, how it works, and two, how to control it.  And if you want to change it . . .

You better learn.

You better learn.  Just for your own personal reasons, to guide your own personal destiny.  (Pause)  My daily life, how I live, depends a great deal on the kind of town I live in, and what my neighbors are like.  Therefore, a much wider social commitment is imperative for purely selfish reasons.  Just so things remain that I enjoy, like killdeer nesting in the back field, or having water in my ditch so that I can garden instead of having the water cut off by the next-door housing development.

That’s what Milagro was all about.  The critical choices we have to make.

And also that your life is so connected to the life of the community, the next person, your neighbor, the country, the world.  Also, you become much more politically powerful on a very local level if you really understand and admit and use universal connections.  It also makes for a much more hopeful life.  (Pause)  We live in a country that seems to promote nihilism.  It promotes the idea that it is hopeless.  It seems to me that one of the ideas that keeps the economic system functioning is the myth that it’s all so hopeless that we might as well forget it.  Eat, drink, and be merry.  Look out for our own self-interests and exploit everything.

Hedonistic nihilism . . .

Exactly.  And the world’s going to end anyway.  This makes for a lot of selfishness.  And it makes people really desperate.  It’s really clear that no matter how much materialistic shit you get, it doesn’t make for satisfaction or fulfillment.

You’re not so self-absorbed?

Yeah.  I just got real bored with myself.  I got bored worrying about how important or unimportant I was.  I got bored with worrying about my personal life being the most important thing on earth.  I got bored with a whole lot of self-absorption.  The Nirvana Blues is sort of a whole reaction to the whole “me-decade” of self-absorption.

I wondered about that the other night while watching Reds, when Henry Miller got on there and started talking about Reed being afraid to face his own problems.  I mean you can’t take on the world’s problems.   As Miller said, “Jesus Christ tried it and he got crucified.”

That was a very facetious remark.

Yes, it was.  Granted, but Miller was making his point.  Of course, he was a fellow who was really wrapped up in himself, very self-absorbed.  Me-as-the-world.

But I like him.  He was great.  Lots of levels.  A wonderful writer.

(Pause)  I have the impression that a lot of people rely on you.

I have a theory that since I can earn a lot more money than most of my friends, and that there’s a real unequal distribution of wealth going down, unfairly . . . I’ve got friends who bust their asses eight, ten hours a day mopping floors or waiting on tables who earn nothing, and yet their work is every bit as difficult or impossible as my own work.  Maybe I feel guilty about being able to earn the money.  And so it seems that a certain amount of it should be shared.  I don’t have any sympathy for how money works, so I seem a real idiot in every facet of dealing with money except giving it away.  Like last year, I earned a lot of extra money, it just blew out of the sky due to films and stuff.  I went to an accountant and said, “What do I do with this?  I don’t want to give it to Haig.”  And he said, “Why don’t you invest it?”  I said, okay, and invested in a house for a friend to live in.  Then the well went dry, and the fumigators had to come because the house was full of bugs and then the tree in the backyard fell on the neighbor’s chicken coop which had to be rebuilt.  (Laughter)  And I was just trying to hang on.  Then I had the drillers come and they hit an artesian well which pumped water out at fifty gallons a minute.  They couldn’t figure out how to cap it.  I had to call these people from Farmington and meanwhile the drillers are saying, you’ll never get another one.  They drilled a couple of yards away and hit another one which had to be capped.  That cost $5,000 and not a drop of water.  I blew all the money trying to keep the house together and wound up selling it at a ten to $15,000 loss.  It was what some people would call a disaster.  To me it was just a lesson to stay out of things that you don’t believe in.

What will you do next year when you make a bunch of money?  (Smiles) 

I’ll just let it trickle away like it usually trickles away.  Give it to the Tierra Amarilla clinic.

To change the subject, are you working on a novel at the moment – the big one?

I want to write a book about the rise of industrial-capitalism in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War to the present.

A non-fiction book?

No, fiction.  I’d like to deal with immigration, the rise of the robber-barons, railroads, Morgan, Fisk, Jay Gould.

Is this for research?  (Indicating one of a pile of books on the kitchen table) The History of Standard Oil . . .

Yeah, I’ll take you on a tour of the inner sanctum, if you like.  Show you my research stuff.

John takes us into the main room of the house, the walls lined with bookshelves filled to overflowing  with books.  At one end of the room is a writing desk, at the other an upright piano.  (At the conclusion of our rambling, two and a half hours of conversation, Nichols sits down at the piano and plays us an original composition – a wry, country and western ballad.  He is also a fair blues, and boogie-woogie player.)  He shows us a page of proofs of his color photographs for his forthcoming Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, and after the tour we head back to the kitchen.  The phone rings and John answers.  As I head for the bathroom I hear him yell to Parks, “Tell him not to flush the toilet!”  I don’t and go back into the kitchen as John, after a long conversation about a speech he has to make, hangs up the phone.

Every day three or four things come up and it’s hard to say “No!”  It’s like this pathological sickness, dealing with saying no to these voice or faces.  That’s why the phone’s unlisted, but somehow the number got out.  In letters I can do it.  It’s just a piece of paper.  I don’t have much discipline.  It’s gotten so the only time I can write is at night because there are so many interruptions.  When I wrote Milagro, I had no career.  It’s not like I’m rich and famous now, but we live in a very small pond and my stuff is well-known in the New Mexico, Rocky Mountain region.  There are always people asking me to do this or that, come here or there.  There’s no more autonomy.  Plus, just living in Taos, everyday someone calls.  A neighbor’s horse died, would I help come bury it?  A car won’t work, can you jump it?  I split up with my wife, can I stay at your house for three nights?  There’s always something.  You can’t ignore it.  You’re connected in this.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons you live here?

That’s one of the reasons I leave here, too.  (Laughter)  It just gets harder and harder to work.

You’ve had quite a steady output of work. 

That’s the other thing.  In this country . . . you get credit real easily for doing mediocre shit.  Everybody always says, “Jesus Christ, Nichols, you have such an output.  You do so much work . . . “and I know, one, I know all the flaws in the books, and two, I know how much I could really do with discipline.  Instead, I sit down at 8 o’clock and read People magazine, (laughter) then I read a little John Reed, then I’ll make myself a sandwich and have a beer, and then I watch the NCAA (the NCAA basketball championships were going on at the time of this interview), and then I read the Denver Post (more laughter) and then I start working and it’s 1 a.m. and I’m tired.

But you’re trying to make a very big step with this next novel?

Oh yeah.  This next novel may take six, eight, or ten years or something.  And who knows, it may be the last novel I ever write.

You’re in no hurry . . .

No.  I’ll . . . wait it out.  If you want to do something you might as well put everything you got into a great big project rather than do . . . Every now and then I get panicked and I say, wait a minute, your career will die unless you do another couple of books in between, or do a smaller novel just to keep the flame burning.

Like The Ghost in the Music?

Yeah.  Now that book, I wrote the first draft in 1965, but it was about a lobsterman in Maine.  I rewrote it time and time again, and it wound up as a grade Z movie director stunt person on location in New Mexico.  But the thing I wanted to do was write a book about what happens to creative energy in America, which nobody’s gonna realize when they read that book.  They’re just gonna see this funky little book, but the thing that triggered it was finally reading a biography of Elvis Presley and how this guy with incredible talent just blew it.  He got all this money so what does he do?  He buys this great big house and then he buys a bulldozer and wrecks the house.  And so I wanted to write a book about what we do with our creative artistic energy.  It doesn’t have to be any real outlet, so we just self-destruct.  (Pause)  You know, I get so enraged.  To me it’s kind of tragic, the- kind of credence we give to the Scott Fitzgerald myth, and the Anne Sexton myth, the Sylvia Plath myth, Dylan Thomas.  That’s it . . . When you have this incredible kind of gift, or talent, or however you got it, through genetics or just hard work, that it’s an obligation to destroy it.  Or that people don’t know how to turn it into real . . . I mean, why is it obligatory for Fitzgerald to burn himself out at 41 or 44?

Why?  That’s a very good question.  Is it because of the cultural milieu he found himself in?

Yeah, I think so.

American culture?

Yeah.  Yeah, I think so.

Everything is disposable.  Including artists?  You fight for “success,” and once you make it you self-destruct?  Like John Belushi, most recently.

There’s no wider sort of social or historical perspective that lets people be survivors.  I don’t think that romantic self-destruction myth is half as strong in Europe, in France.  Those guys live, and not only do they live a long time and have a distinguished career in letters or whatever, but they even become politicians and statesmen.  Mitterand, right?  The guy has read.  Neruda was an ambassador for his country!  He lived, you know . . . it wasn’t a part of the artistic process to destroy yourself.  And in our country it is.  You know, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley . . . I look around and see people I care about, and they’re killing themselves, and they’ve got so much talent.  But it doesn’t get a wider forum.  You get Oscars, or you make movies, and you get lots of money, but somehow you don’t really . . . you just repeat yourself and it’s not very fulfilling.  It’s sad, and you don’t grow, you don’t grow!  You sort of stop or something.  (Pause)  I don’t know why we got on that.  But it’s real . . . it’s not easy to lead a creative, positive life.  I’m 42 and my body’s breaking down.  I’ve always been an athlete, right?  From now on it’s going to be easy to stay . . . I’m going to have to go out there, and I run . . .

Pete Rose is 41 and he’s playing pro ball . . .

Yeah, right, I know, but the point is you have to work at it, and work at it real hard, and society doesn’t make it easy.  There’s just a lot of negative stuff from absorption in automobiles to, to . . . what are the values?  I mean how many people do you know that are real concerned with values above and beyond the selfish material values?  Or who struggles hard to do work – intellectual work, or human work, or work that keeps them from growing?  It’s as if we live in a society that encourages people to solidify, and just find their own trench and protect it.  But you can grow.  You can do it, and it’s important. 

Thom Collins, Stephen Parks, June 1982